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ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

Sburnh

Hi

We are currently looking to deploy ArcGIS on Citrix across our Authority. Does anybody have any experience of running ArcGIS on Citrix as opposed to Desktop clients? We are especially interested in known issues/ performance and optimum settings for improving speed, which initial testing has shown to be very slow. We will be running on a minimum version of 9.3, but possibly 10.

Any help or advise would be much appreciated!

Thanks

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AaronHixson

We are in the process of doing the same thing with ArcGIS 10. We are putting it on a Citrix6 Farm on Server 2008 R2 servers.

To solve the printing issue, we have created a print server that is in the data center that is local to our Citrix farms. This allows the print jobs to off load the terminal servers quickly. When then have the print servers print directly to the local/network printers inthe various offices directly across the WAN. In our testing phase this is what yielded us the best results for printing.

Still, I was hoping there would be others with a Citrix 6 and ArcMap 10 environment that I could do more reading on so I can know how to optimize my Citrix installation to get the best performance for my environment.

jduval

We have moved to XenApp 6.0 in June 2010 and currently using 9.3 SP1. We want to move to ArcGIS 10.0 but am waiting to hear from ESRI if it has been tested/supported in this kind of Citrix Environment (OS is Windows Server 2008 SR2 64-bit). We currently only have 11 GIS users which are the only users on this server. Performance-wise, it's good for mapping and general analysis. I find it slow on editing and the help menu has issues (can't access from programs).

I found out today that because the license server is on Citrix, our local desktops/laptops won't be able to borrow (in ArcGIS 10) any licenses because it cannot directly connect to the license server. (The Citrix farm is in another city) This is a big drawback for us as we have users that go out in the field where there is no cellphone/internet coverage.

I'm interested in the comments in this thread...

Julie

abureaux_0-1727206276145.png

Anonymous User

I found out today that because the license server is on Citrix, our local desktops/laptops won't be able to borrow (in ArcGIS 10) any licenses because it cannot directly connect to the license server. (The Citrix farm is in another city) This is a big drawback for us as we have users that go out in the field where there is no cellphone/internet coverage.

I am not able to personally test this without access to a Citrix environment, but I double checked with a couple of sources that say you should be able to borrow a license from the license manager that is running in the Citrix environment as long as the client can connect to it. Maybe you could provide more details (error messages, connectivity issues, etc.)

GregoryPonto1

Julie - Don't give up hope:

1. Take a look at the following KB Article in response to a bug we've found with ArcInfo license borrowing:
http://resources.arcgis.com/content/kbase?fa=articleShow&d=38021

2. If you are trying to borrow over latent connections you may also want to look at:
http://resources.arcgis.com/content/kbase?fa=articleShow&d=35659

We do support ArcGIS Desktop 10 and License Manager 10 in Citrix environments. For that matter, the Citrix display rendered on your local system is not actually running on your local system but is in fact running on the Citrix server itself. Therefore the only connection to be concerned about is that between the Citrix server and the server running ArcGIS License Manager. If you can consume you should also be able to borrow, which makes me feel you are actually running into the borrow bug addressed the the first URL above.

Let us know what happens.

jduval

Hi, we haven't installed ArcGIS10 on the Citrix Environment yet, so I have not actually tested whether the borrowing would work or not. The IT managing our Citrix servers wanted me to investigate whether the license borrowing would work. ESRI Support said that my local desktop must be able to connect to the license manager.

My local desktop cannot connect to the Citrix server that is acting as the license manager. I connect to the Citrix servers via an internet portal.

What happens when I borrow a license? Does it create a license file? If my Citrix desktop borrowed the license, would I be able to copy it to my local desktop and use it?

I'm hoping to implement ArcGIS10 within the next week - I will keep you posted.

Julie

jduval

We are in the process of doing the same thing with ArcGIS 10. We are putting it on a Citrix6 Farm on Server 2008 R2 servers.

To solve the printing issue, we have created a print server that is in the data center that is local to our Citrix farms. This allows the print jobs to off load the terminal servers quickly. When then have the print servers print directly to the local/network printers inthe various offices directly across the WAN. In our testing phase this is what yielded us the best results for printing.

Still, I was hoping there would be others with a Citrix 6 and ArcMap 10 environment that I could do more reading on so I can know how to optimize my Citrix installation to get the best performance for my environment.

Hi ahixson, we are now running ArcGIS10 on XenApp6 running on Win Server 2008 R2 Std. ArcMap is very slow in performance - it sometimes takes up to 10 minutes just to add a data layer. Have you experienced abnormally slow performance? I have contacted ESRI support and it looks to be a Ctirix issue. I'm hoping ESRI will pursue this since I keep getting told that ESRI support ArcGIS 10 on Citrix.

Julie

KarenGrassi

I am not able to personally test this without access to a Citrix environment, but I double checked with a couple of sources that say you should be able to borrow a license from the license manager that is running in the Citrix environment as long as the client can connect to it. Maybe you could provide more details (error messages, connectivity issues, etc.)

If you can you may want to host the desktop license manager on a server that is not associated with your CITRIX farm but accessible to it. That is the solution that we at Miami-Dade County utilize and it works great.

GregoryPonto1

Julie -

Is the poor performance on client side systems only? For example, if you can find a way to remote into the Citrix box (Win2k8) using RDP, do you find the performance remains slow? Also, running Task Manager on the Citrix box, how many ArcMap.exe's do you see running? ArcMap is a pretty hefty product it is quite easy to overwhelm a Citrix server with only a few clients.

jduval

Julie -

Is the poor performance on client side systems only? For example, if you can find a way to remote into the Citrix box (Win2k8) using RDP, do you find the performance remains slow? Also, running Task Manager on the Citrix box, how many ArcMap.exe's do you see running? ArcMap is a pretty hefty product it is quite easy to overwhelm a Citrix server with only a few clients.

ESRI Support asked to me to test that as well. When a user used RDP to remote in, the peformance was 'normal'.

When I run Task Manager, I only see my own apps running. We only have 10 users (clients) on a 16 CPU and 12GB Ram server (new since June 2010). The CPU usage rarely goes beyond 10%, memory usage is usually around 5GB. Performance was also extremely slow when only 1 user (administrator) was logged on. I don't think we are overwhelming our Citrix server...

Thanks for your feedback! Any other suggestions to try?

Julie

BruceAnger

We have had ArcFm running in a Citrix environment for 4 years and ever since IT put it on we have been begging them to take it off the citrix environment, it is frequently slow where it takes 10 mins to save or to do an edit, it won't change printers you need to convert map to a PDF first. And if you want a real exercise in futility try creating an A0 sized map and then adding or editing anything on the map.

By the way we recently were checking server loads on our system and while we found the server with SDE on it rarely used more then 50% of its processor, the citrix server seemed to be the one doing the calculations and was the server maxing out at 100% for minutes on end.

If you can avoid it, don't use citrix.

MarkSalter

We are finding ArcMap 9.3 through XenApp 5 OK in some respects, but very difficult in others. In particular at the moment we are stuck trying to get hyperlinks to image files working as they always respond with "Unable to open '<path>\<file>'. Please make sure the path is correct and the document exists". Works OK with text files, and when run locally on the server with an admin a/c, but not from clients. Must be some sort of file association / launching another program from within a program issue.

Mark Salter
National Museum of Wales

ScottBarker

Mark,

We are having the exact same issue where we get the "unable to open...", but is we are admin or logged into the desktop the image (tif) opens successfully.

Did you ever find what caused this problem?

Thanks,

Scott Barker
Alabama Gas

JosephWallis

Does anyone know how to change the default.gdb location for users accessing ArcGIS Desktop 10 in Citrix? I don't want the server filling up with these default GDBs. Also, I'd like to know how to redirect this local cache folder to the user's home drive and not a folder on the citrix server. Any thoughts?

GregoryPonto

Does anyone know how to change the default.gdb location for users accessing ArcGIS Desktop 10 in Citrix? I don't want the server filling up with these default GDBs. Also, I'd like to know how to redirect this local cache folder to the user's home drive and not a folder on the citrix server. Any thoughts?

You can probably get what you are looking for by enabling "Special Folder Redirection," a Citrix concept will push the GDBs created for each profile back to the client (http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/web-interface-hardwick/wi-enable-special-folder-redirection-gransden.html). BUT....be advised that enabling "Special Folder Redirection" within Citrix results in a considerable performance loss from the client side as data that normally would be locally available to the Citrix server now has to traverse the LAN/WAN link between client and server. (Among a host of other complications).

JeffDeWeese

Hi

We are currently looking to deploy ArcGIS on Citrix across our Authority. Does anybody have any experience of running ArcGIS on Citrix as opposed to Desktop clients? We are especially interested in known issues/ performance and optimum settings for improving speed, which initial testing has shown to be very slow. We will be running on a minimum version of 9.3, but possibly 10.

Any help or advise would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Hello. Esri has many, many, customer running ArcGIS Desktop on Citrix XenApp. We have a presentation we did at the last User Conference which addresses many of your questions. Please write me a jdeweese@esri.com and I can provide you with more details. Thanks.

Jeff DeWeese
Esri - Enterprise Systems Architect

GregoryPonto

We've recently seen a successful Citrix XenApp based ArcGIS Desktop 10.x deployment consumed on Macintosh. Some challenges to be expected, but I wanted to post the Citrix prescibed solution if it helps anyone in that area:

Citrix/XenApp + ArcGIS Desktop 10 + Macintosh Client: Configure the application not to run in "seamless" mode and lock the application to a given resolution (800x600) for example.

GregoryPonto

Though I earlier in this thread stated that we have experienced little to no problems in using the Citrix Deployment method for ArcGIS, there have been a few little pesky items. One of which follows:

When I thry to author and serve out a map (either through ArcServer or Publisher) using ArcGIS through the Citrix connection, the data links break and the end user (web or ArcReader) sees only the data holder in the TOC along with the broken link symbol.

Same map is then opened in ArcGIS on a local install, the data sources reset to exactly what they were before(but resetting is required), then the maps as served out (via ArcServer or Publisher) contain active links and all is well.

After researching this a bit, I did discover that when looking at the data sources for the .MXD file in ArcCatalog, the connection file found on the \Application Data\ESRI\ArcCatalog\[connection].sde path was set to where the IT folks are preserving the profile information that Citrix uses when a user is logging in. (see attached).

The data source file is shown on another computer - in this case:\\rcg-file1\appdata$\jearmstrong\Application Data\ESRI\ArcCatalog\SdeConnect@richmond_vector.sde - this is where the user profiles are being stored

Normally this connection would be "Database Connections\SdeConnect@richmond_vector.sde" which seems to resolve to C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\ESRI\ArcCatalog\Admin@richmond_vector.sde.

Is there a way to set this data connection path to allow data in a map service authored through the Citrix deployment of ArcGIS to be viewable by the end users? I realize there is a manual workaround, but that kind of defeats the purpose of running the GIS through Citrix. I hope somebody can shed some light on this issue.

thanks

James Armstrong
Richmond County, North Carolina
GIS

James -

Disable "Special Folder Redirection" (http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/web-interface-hardwick/wi-enable-special-folder-redirection-gransden.html)

We just resolved this exact issue with another client with this solution.

JosephWallis

You can probably get what you are looking for by enabling "Special Folder Redirection," a Citrix concept will push the GDBs created for each profile back to the client (http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/web-interface-hardwick/wi-enable-special-folder-redirection-gransden.html). BUT....be advised that enabling "Special Folder Redirection" within Citrix results in a considerable performance loss from the client side as data that normally would be locally available to the Citrix server now has to traverse the LAN/WAN link between client and server. (Among a host of other complications).

instead of pushing them back to the client, I would like to push them to the user's "home" drive which is on the local network with the Citrix server. Does this special folder redirection accomplish that? I'd also like to redirect the cache folder to their home drive as well.

GregoryPonto

instead of pushing them back to the client, I would like to push them to the user's "home" drive which is on the local network with the Citrix server. Does this special folder redirection accomplish that? I'd also like to redirect the cache folder to their home drive as well.

Inteller- As this is more of a core Citrix question than an Esri question, I'll admit I am at a position of disadvantage and will certainly welcome a Citrix expert's take on this. That said, the functionality that you are looking for, in my experience, is the default behavior (Special Folder Redirection disabled.) We use local (not roaming) profiles, and as each user runs ArcMap via Citrix, the user home, user profile, etc, all are created locally on the Citrix server. I'd equate this to a Terminal Services/RDP session. You are on your own workstation, but all the processing, file referneces, home directories, etc, all exist and are utilized on the server (Citrix does tend to blur this line a bit though).

That said, I'll make a note to check on the behavior though and get back to you as soon as I can.

RenatoSalvaleon

Mark/Scott,

This is not a citrix issue and should be posted in the ArcGIS Server forum.

For your convenience I'll reply here.

This was a major pain for me as well until I found an ESRI ArcGIS Server 9.3 documentation. I am working on a 931 platform but I'll continue testing this in 10 soon.

These two pages help me understand the problem better:
http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisserver/9.3.1/dotNet/index.htm
http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisserver/9.3.1/dotNet/index.htm

The answer depends a lot on where you store your imagery. We store our imagery on dedicated NAS file servers, we (domain users granted permissions in the networks shares) can definetely connect and add these data in our MXDs. However, a user local to ArcGIS server host machine (ARCGISSOC) is not a domain user. I think I read it somewhere in server documentation that it's not good practice to use a domain user as well for your web services - I'm digressing.

Back to the issue. When I publish maps from ArcMap either as MSD or just straight to the Server, the user that actually consumes these images from the web services is ARCGISSOC user (I'm not an expert but someone can confirm or debate this). ArcGISSOC local user does not have permissions on the folder shares where your images are unless you create this user with read permissions on that file server(folder) with exactly the same name as the local\ARCGISSOC user created by post installation on the ArcGIS server machine.

In our case there's no pretty solution because our IT manages these folder shares (file server where you can manage users or groups) and adding a local user is an exception.

My solution for this particular problem is
- create similar project folder structures on my desktop and the arcgis server host machine. (normally servers have a second hard drive for data - physical E drive in our case - avoid using the C drive)
- copy the images from the network share to the desktop and arcgis server host project folder
- create a local user ARCGISSOC on my desktop
- publish the MXD without any problems

This workaround is good for us because the web apps will be online for less than 3 months while the project is in progress. We really just dump the duplicate images, services and the web app afterwards.

In my opinion the best solution is to manage our own file server, create a local user id on this network share file server, then I don't have to be doing this data duplication. Another option I want to pursue is Image server for ArcGIS10. We've tried 9.2 in the past and we did not succeed.

Hope this helps.

Renato Salvaleon
Georgia Power Land Department

Mark,

We are having the exact same issue where we get the "unable to open...", but is we are admin or logged into the desktop the image (tif) opens successfully.

Did you ever find what caused this problem?

Thanks,

Scott Barker
Alabama Gas

GregoryPonto

If anyone is experiencing visual artifacts with ArcGIS 10.x (or prior release) on Citrix, reducing Application Color Depth to 16-bit color seems to address a number of these issues.
(Citrix Access Management Console > Farm > Application > ArcMap > Properties > Advanced > Appearance > Colors > Set to 16-bit)

Most notably, recently we found that Citrix clients running ArcGIS 10.0 / XenApp 4.x / Windows 2003 Server are unable to render the "ArcGIS Online" browser from within ArcMap. Reducing ArcMap color depth to 16-bit addresses this issue.

* The issue does not surface with ArcGIS Desktop 10.0 / XenApp 5.x / Windows 2008 Server.

I'll continue to post these "tips" as we run across them.

jduval

ESRI Support asked to me to test that as well. When a user used RDP to remote in, the peformance was 'normal'.

When I run Task Manager, I only see my own apps running. We only have 10 users (clients) on a 16 CPU and 12GB Ram server (new since June 2010). The CPU usage rarely goes beyond 10%, memory usage is usually around 5GB. Performance was also extremely slow when only 1 user (administrator) was logged on. I don't think we are overwhelming our Citrix server...

Thanks for your feedback! Any other suggestions to try?

Julie

I forgot to post that the performance issue I was experiencing on my setup of ArcGIS 10 running on XenApp 6.0 and Windows Server 2008 Std R2 was resolved.

When logging into Citrix, I goto the Preferences tab and then Session Settings. There is a section for 'Local resources: Use my Documents and Desktop folder' This needs to be UNCHECKED.

What was happening is that ArcMap would open and look for the default geodb on my local C: across the internet and back - which slowed ArcMap performance tremendously. This also occured when I opened any tool from ArcToolBox as it automatically points to the same default geodb (regardless if I pointed my project's default somewhere else).

Also, to note, any ArcMap 10 that I had opened/created before this issue was resolved, still pointed to my local C:. I would then have to repoint it to a citrix drive, save, and all would be well.

I hope this info saves a lot of headaches for other users out there!

Julie
Alberta, Canada

GregoryPonto

Since the release we've seen a number of inquiries regarding Citrix and ArcGIS Desktop 10. The most common issue we're seeing is that of remote client performance. In most instances, this type of performance problem is resolved with the following Teminal Services configuration change:

Terminal Services Configuration > ICA-tcp Properties > Client Settings
> Color Depth = Limit to 16-bits
> Redirection > Disable > Drive, Windows Printer, LPT Port, Audio, Default to main client printer
(See attached screenshot)

[ATTACH]4064[/ATTACH]

This configuration will prevent Citrix from accessing local data on client systems thereby eliminating the problem of large data sets streaming from client to Citrix back to client.

image001.jpg

LisaDygert1

Hello,

We have been running ArcGIS 9.1 through Citrix for a number of years now and it has worked well and met our needs. We are now trying to upgrade to 9.3.1 and have encountered several problems every time we try testing the environment in 9.3.1. We are using ArcGIS 9.3.1 with SDE 9.3.1 in an enterprise environment. The problems we are encountering typically involve users not being able to get into ArcGIS, opening templates, loading data, etc. after we get approximately 12-15 people online at the same time. It works fine prior to that, but as soon as that many people get on, it bogs down the system and no longer allows people to get into ArcGIS. We have 35 licenses for ArcGIS and many more for Citrix, so we want to be able to allow as many people on as licenses we have available (35), but at this point with 9.3.1 that doesn't seem likely. Is there anything we can do to eliminate the connection problems?

Any assistance at all would be greatly appreciated. 😉

Thanks,
Lisa Dygert

AaronHixson

Do the users notice a big difference when reducing it from 32-bit to 16-bit?

JeffDeWeese

Lisa,

Do you have at least SP1 for 9.3.1 installed? If not, you will need a special patch (not on the support site) that fixes memory issues for multi-user ArcGIS Desktop environments. This sounds like it may be what you are experiencing based on the description.

Jeff DeWeese
Esri

AaronHixson

Has ESRI posted any articles on how to properly optimize settings for best performance? I know there have been some posts here, but some documentation from ESRI would be wonderful.

We currently have a XenApp 6.0 Citrix Farm. We have 5 presentation servers. 4 are HP Proliant DL360 G6 servers with 12GB of Ram and two processors giving us 16 processing threads. We plan to upgrade to 24 GB of Ram very soon. All four servers run ArcMap 9.3.1 with SP2

my email is aaron@hixsonfamily.net- fyi

We also have a Virtual Machien presentation server hosting ArcMap 10 so that our end users can get their feet wet with the new version of ArcMap. We plan to upgrade the entire envionrment to ArcMap 10 sometime this summer.

GaryWalter1

A Best Practices doc would be invaluable. We are using ArcGIS 9.3.1 on XenApp6. Our users make use of My Network Places for UNC pathing, but on the XenApp6 build ArcCatalog doesn't see the My Network Places mappings.

JohnGravois

Hi All,
We just diagnosed an issue in ArcGIS 10.0 in which labels appear blurry when raster imagery is also present in the map. It seems that the lossy compression policy in place in the Citrix Delivery Service Console (XenApp 6) was causing the issue.

Blurriness is apparent in ArcGIS when the default "medium" setting is applied across the Citrix server. It improves somewhat when setting compression to "low", and is corrected completely when set to "none". Of course, additional compression preserves bandwidth, so network traffic should also be taken into consideration when applying settings.

Compression_LossyNone.png

Compression_LossyLow.png

Compression_LossyMedium.png

BruceRichardson

We are having this problem with XenApp 5.5/Win2003/ArcGIS 10 and we have set it to 16-bit. So that does not seem to solve the issue. Any other ideas?

If anyone is experiencing visual artifacts with ArcGIS 10.x (or prior release) on Citrix, reducing Application Color Depth to 16-bit color seems to address a number of these issues.
(Citrix Access Management Console > Farm > Application > ArcMap > Properties > Advanced > Appearance > Colors > Set to 16-bit)

Most notably, recently we found that Citrix clients running ArcGIS 10.0 / XenApp 4.x / Windows 2003 Server are unable to render the "ArcGIS Online" browser from within ArcMap. Reducing ArcMap color depth to 16-bit addresses this issue.

* The issue does not surface with ArcGIS Desktop 10.0 / XenApp 5.x / Windows 2008 Server.

I'll continue to post these "tips" as we run across them.

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